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>The less JavaScript (especially third-party) you have on your landing pages, the better. It’s a better customer experience, and it improves your page’s conversion and quality score.

Really wish I read this more. And not just for the landing page.




I'm surprised we haven't run into this before now. JS performance on android has been stagnant for a while now, yet we still see the same awful JS-heavy applications.

This doesn't bode well for the end of Moore's law. That is Moore's law in the performance sense, i.e. guaranteed future single-core performance increases [even if small], not Moore's law as in the the doubling transistor density.


Companies that keep their JS footprint small will have faster-loading pages, and that translates to non-trivial increase in profits. Sadly, people running businesses don't understand this, and tech teams certainly aren't going to voluntarily make their jobs harder without word coming down from above. So do your company a favor - educate those in charge about how much page load time matters.


This isn't strictly true.

Most B2B SaaS's, which I would bet is the most common front end developer on HN, do not see significant benefits from fast loading. They will see issues with slow loading, and they can't ignore bundle size, but the benefits to development speed from a pure JS front-end from this kinds of sites is realised as value by the client.

B2C SaaS, and you start to see a different story, largely due to the wider variety of devices and more mobile friendly focus.

Non SaaS, product sales or news focused businesses facing joe public are likely as you say.


> tech teams certainly aren't going to voluntarily make their jobs harder without word coming down from above

SourceHut does this. It's not a categorical impossibility, but I agree devs are generally going to be inclined to continue with 'business as usual'.

Does it really make dev work that much harder though? I'm not really qualified to comment. Presumably it's going to simplify things in at least some ways.

> do your company a favor - educate those in charge about how much page load time matters.

There you have it - the people making the case for less JavaScript may be the devs themselves.


Amazing that this isn't universally known at this point.


Unfortunately, Amazon S3 and Akamai CDNs will come to their rescue in still making their pages load faster. As a plebeian, all my efforts at keeping my pages light will go in vain as I simply can't afford the CDN infrastructure of these tech giants.


Don't today's bloated, slow-loading pages already use these CDNs?


> yet we still see the same awful JS-heavy applications.

Isn't Google's AMP just a bunch of Javascript too? So even their "fix" is just perpetuating the issue


I fucking hate AMP so much. Wish someone ended it


I don't like the idea of AMP, and I was really concerned when I first heard about it.

However, ::knock on wood::, I don't seem to have encountered it that much.

Maybe it's because of how I browse, and that I don't follow "football" news, but I almost never see the URL in my browser, nor links to it anywhere.

How do people typically come across AMP content?


I came across AMP regularly from Google search on mobile. I switched to Firefox on Android and DuckDuckGo and haven't noticed it since. Not why I switched, but a nice side effect.


Ah! Thank you for pointing this out. You just cleared something up for me.

I use Firefox on my mobile and I always wondered why people keep complaining about Amp, since I never see it.


Why?


third-party js no less.


> Moore's law in the [single-core] performance sense…not Moore's law as in the the doubling transistor density.

Moore’s law is only about the latter, it says nothing about performance.


Yes, but in practice the two have been strongly correlated for a very long time.


Abysmall programming has been compensating for any Moore's Law benefits since a while now, but the present android/npm generation has surpassed so much in that ability that at times, it seems they have actually reversed the Moore's Law with their incompetence!




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